Tearing Down the Wall of Sound

by Mick Brown

  One night, Roy Carr, a journalist from the New Musical Express who had traveled from Britain to meet Spector, arrived at the studio with Bruce Springsteen, who was in Los Angeles promoting his new album Born to Run—a bravura work whose panoramic, wide-screen production paid explicit homage to the Wall of Sound, and which had seen Springsteen hailed as the new messiah of rock.

  Spector was working on the track “Baby, Let’s Stick Together,” and Springsteen, Carr remembers, “was in awe. It was the full Phil Spector experience, with the bells and chimes and Dion! Phil turned round jokingly at one point and said, ‘Hey, doesn’t that make Born to Run suck?’ And Bruce just laughed and put his arms round him. He was in heaven.”

  But to Carr “most of the session seemed to be Phil just pissing around—being Phil Spector. ‘Hey guys…Gene, Gene give me more attention—oh great, he’s just taken his cock out…’ That kind of thing. He was just entertaining everybody. Then he did a couple of run-throughs. And five minutes before the scheduled end of the session, just when all the musicians were thinking, Great, we’re going into overtime, he did two takes, and said, ‘That’s it.’”

  To Nino Tempo, it seemed that Spector wasn’t taking the sessions, or the arrangements he was providing, seriously at all. “He didn’t seem to have the concentration, and he didn’t want to spend the time necessary to go through each part. He’d say ‘Oh we’ll get it in the session’ or ‘You write something; I’m sure it’ll be fine.’ He didn’t seem to have the patience that he used to have. And the frivolity, the party-animal kind of mentality—that had never happened in the old days; there’d be no partying around—it was work. But now it was almost like he cared more about entertaining everybody in the booth than about what he was recording. Always talking and laughing, telling jokes. And this is time that musicians were getting paid.

  “Things were going into golden time—that’s double, double time. In one overnight session I must have made a couple of thousand dollars on two short arrangements and a couple of thousand dollars just being the bandleader. You would think that I didn’t care what happened. But I had a certain sense of pride in my work. We started on a midnight session and by four in the morning we hadn’t recorded anything. Finally I got pissed off, I told every musician to shut the fuck up. And I said to Phil, ‘What are we going to do? Are we finally going to record something?’ And do you know what he said? ‘Let’s take five…’ I was so pissed that I just packed up and went home. And then the next day I got a telegram, apologizing and asking me to come back tomorrow night, there’s another session. He said, ‘Just make the money,’ and then it was a party all over again.”

  Spector had always been a perfectionist in the studio, always worked to his own coordinates, indifferent to the opinion or needs of others. In the past that perfectionism had been directed toward a specific end, which Spector could see, even if nobody else could. But increasingly it seemed that his coordinates were shot.

  Recording the title track, “Born to Be with You,” Spector asked Dion to perform a “guide” vocal for the backing track, and then declared it was the only take he needed. Dion knew he could do better, but Spector didn’t seem to care.

  Yet seemingly good performances would be passed over, with Spector calling for endless retakes. “Whatever he did, it never seemed to be good enough,” Devra remembers. “Something would be great, but he would want to redo it, remix and remix, over and over again. It drove everybody mad.”

  The finished album contained just seven tracks produced by Spector (with two earlier songs, including “Your Own Backyard”), and the results were as distracted as the mood in which it was created. It wasn’t that Spector was short of ideas: the album brimmed with sonic wonders—chiming guitars, zithers, bells. The extraordinary “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” in particular, which had an echoing Dion battling against a titanic string arrangement and what sounded like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, attained a weird, transcendent beauty. But if anything, there were too many ideas; what was lacking was coherence and fire. Much as he had with the Cher sessions, Spector had elected to render one song after another as a monolithic plod. Where once the Wall of Sound had conjured an irrepressible optimism and joy, it now sounded burdened with the worries of the world. Where once there had been blue skies, now there were dark, brooding clouds.

  So ponderous were the final mixes that when Zach Glickman heard them he was convinced that Spector had slowed the tapes down even more, so that what should have been playing at 33 rpm now sounded as if it were playing at 25. Dion, appalled at the results, fulminated to Glickman that it sounded like “funeral music” and effectively disowned the project. He would later offer a more considered, and astute, appraisal, reflecting that working with Spector could be “exciting, frustrating, even a little sad at times. He’s a real artist and one who liked to surround himself with spectacle, but it seemed to me that he was afraid of failure. He’s got the image of a genius and that puts a lot of pressure on himself, always trying to outdo his last masterpiece.”

  The executives at Warner Bros. were no more enthusiastic about the album. Where was the energy? Where was the life? David Kessel remembers that Spector was furious with the response. “It was: What’s wrong with these fucking people? But Phil Spector does not make records for record executives; he is the record executive. You have to be the biggest idiot in the world to make a deal with Phil Spector and not expect to get a Phil Spector record.”

  For Devra, Spector’s insistence that the record was a work of genius, that the record company were the fools, not him, could barely conceal the pain he felt at its rejection. “You know how people somehow manifest defensiveness in a bullying way? When they feel picked on, their dukes come up? That’s how Phil was. But I think it must have really messed with him to have that kind of criticism. It’s one thing to be a mad genius, but when people start saying you’re finished musically, that must have really done his head in. I’m sure that was why there was all the angst and the drinking and the craziness. He was like a drowning man, desperately floundering for some sort of retrieval.”

  Chagrined at the response, Spector withdrew the record altogether. It would be another twelve months before Born to Be with You was eventually released, and then only in Britain, under a new deal that Spector and Machat had negotiated with Polydor to release Spector material under the banner of Phil Spector International Records. It would be a further twenty years before a new generation of critics and musicians would start hailing Born to Be with You as Spector’s “forgotten masterpiece.”

  Marty Machat had invited Roy Carr to Los Angeles with a view to writing a treatment for a film about Spector’s life. The working title was To Know Him Is to Love Him: The Phil Spector Story. It should be a celebration of his life, his struggles and his triumphant accomplishments, Spector explained. He had already decided that Al Pacino would play the leading role.

  But the more time Carr spent with Spector, the more it seemed that what he was seeking was not only approbation but reassurance. “He liked to impress you, with his music, his accomplishments, whatever. There was a bit of a Napoleonic complex there. But I think at the back of his mind was the fear that he was yesterday’s man. People would pay lip service to him—Brian Wilson, John Lennon, whoever—but it wasn’t being translated into record sales. And there was Bruce Springsteen with Born to Run, Roy Wood, Meat Loaf, all these people paying homage to his style, and having massive success. And Phil wasn’t making records—or if he was, he was not releasing them, or he was screwing them up. He’d been a great American success story, an icon. And then it was all taken away from him. And that was very hard for him to accept. All the time his catchphrase was, nobody makes better records than I do—all the time. And he wanted you to reply, ‘That’s right, Phil, that’s right.’ I think deep down inside he just wanted to be loved by everybody.”

  Carr put up in the Sunset Marquis hotel, and every few days would make his way to the mansion for meetings. Sometimes his pho
ne would ring at two in the morning, and it would be Spector, telling him a limousine was on its way to collect him.

  In the half-darkness and arctic cold, Spector would hold forth long into the night. “It was never what you’d call a conversation,” Carr says. Stories and more stories. He told Carr that he had been in Paris during the student unrest of 1968, working “with an armed undercover unit” in a capacity that was never specified; he would talk about the evenings in the ’60s when he would entertain Lenny Bruce, Stan Laurel and Bela Lugosi in the mansion. When Carr mentioned that he was planning a book on the martial arts expert and movie star Bruce Lee, Spector started to cry. Lee, he said, had once worked as his personal bodyguard and lived in the house, and Spector himself had invested money in Enter the Dragon, the film that Lee had completed shortly before dying in mysterious circumstances in 1973. Spector told Carr that Lee had been murdered by a martial arts dim mak (death touch) and implored him not to write the book, “Because if they can kill Bruce Lee, they can kill you and your family.”

  Carr was forthright with an acerbic sense of humor, a man whose long experience as a journalist had inured him to the self-regarding fantasies of pop stars. “I remember talking to John Lennon; he really liked Phil, but he told me ‘Phil’s full of bullshit, but you don’t have to put up with it. If you stand up to him he respects that.’ So I kept that in mind.”

  The more Spector talked, the more outrageous his claims became, the harder it became for Carr to tell what was fact and what was fiction. “It got to the point where if he’d told me he was smuggling guns for the contras, I wouldn’t have been surprised.”

  One night, in mid-conversation, Spector stood up and announced he needed to use the bathroom. Carr sat in the semidarkness, awaiting his return. Ten minutes passed. Thirty. An hour. The house was as silent as a tomb. “And suddenly the doors sprung open, and there he was, stripped to the waist, a revolver in his waistband, playing the accordion. I said to him, ‘You always did go in for wonderful entrances.’ He was pissing himself with laughter.”

  Carr quickly came to the conclusion that Spector was “a very lonely man. It would get to three o’clock in the morning and I’d say, ‘Phil, I’m really bushed; I’ve got to go.’ And he’d look panic-stricken. ‘No, stick around.’ I remember once I left there and walked down to Ben Frank’s on the Strip—I hadn’t eaten anything—and I looked out of the window and there was Phil’s limo. It was almost like he was following me. I walked back to my hotel and the car followed behind. Whether he was just seeing I got back safely or not I don’t know, but it was very strange.”

  Devra had been assigned to look after Carr, and on another occasion she was summoned to give him a lift back to his hotel. Driving along the Sunset Strip she noticed a Cadillac suddenly looming in her rearview mirror. It was Spector and the Kessel brothers. “They had shotguns poking out of the window,” she remembers. “They chased us all the way down Sunset Boulevard, with Roy holding on and me driving like a maniac to get away from them. We ended up driving all the way up into the Hollywood Hills to shake them off.” The incident was never explained.

  Carr recalls another night at the mansion when Spector organized an outing to his favorite Chinese restaurant, Ah Fong’s. “Two cars drew up, and they proceeded to fill the boot with pump-guns and shotguns, like a private army. There was me, the Kessels, a couple of mysterious people. We went to Ah Fong’s, and half of it was roped off for us. When we came back afterward, Phil just pulled out his revolver and started shooting at the tree—this is in the front courtyard.”

  When Carr commented that Spector’s security arrangements were “like Fort Knox,” Spector explained that he was taking precautions against his children being kidnapped. “He said if anybody kidnapped them they would know that people like him would pay anything—‘but they also know that if they harmed them, I would hunt them down like dogs and kill them.’ There was a side to Phil where he seemed to see himself as some kind of mercenary.”

  Spector offered Carr a job and asked what he wanted to do. Philles, Carr told him, was a rich part of rock music’s heritage; he suggested going through the entire back catalog and repackaging and presenting it in a historical context, maybe reassembling all of Spector’s old artists—the Crystals, Bob B. Soxx, Darlene Love—and producing a Philles show for the stage. But Spector was unenthusiastic. “He was worried he’d be looked on as a nostalgia act.” When Carr also suggested he should produce the Beach Boys, Spector looked appalled. “But I think what he had was a fear of failure. He’d already experienced that with AM. There was this sense of, What happened if there was a big campaign to reestablish Phil Spector as a major player and the public didn’t go for it?”

  Carr concluded that what Spector really wanted was not an employee but “a playmate. He wanted someone around who knew his history, who loved his music, who would listen to his stories and tell him ‘Phil, you’re wonderful.’ But there’s only so many times you could say that.”

  At length, it was time for Carr to return to England. At a small gathering at the mansion Spector announced he wished to make a presentation. “He pulled out this lovely wooden box. I opened it and it was a Magnum, sitting on a velvet cushion. He said, ‘It’s for you, Roy.’ I said, ‘Phil, I usually use a credit card, and I can’t take this through customs.’ I told him to keep it in the safe.”

  21

  “Leonard, I Love You…”

  A Los Angeleno through and through, Harvey Kubernik had grown up steeped in Los Angeles musical history, and Phil Spector’s illustrious part in it.

  “He’s a Rebel,” “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” had provided the soundtrack for Kubernik’s youth. As a child, he would be taken to Canter’s by his parents and occasionally see Spector at his corner table, noshing deli. Kubernik began writing for local music papers and then became Melody Maker’s Los Angeles correspondent, and he would occasionally see Spector around town: at AM Studios, where Spector was producing the “Bangla-Desh” sessions; at a Bobby Bland show at the Whisky a Go Go, when having shouted and screamed throughout the opening act, the Dixie Hummingbirds, an inebriated Spector was escorted out before Bland even appeared onstage. Before long, Kubernik had been admitted to the charmed circle that was allowed to watch Spector at work in the studio. Personable and obliging, Kubernik became “the food runner.” Spector would spring a $100 bill for deli for everyone from Canter’s—“and don’t forget the receipt…” “The first time, I didn’t bring anything back for myself,” Kubernik remembers. “Phil said, ‘What’s your mother’s name?’ I told him and he said, ‘She’s doing a good job.’” But when Kubernik asked if he might bring some musician friends to a session, Spector upbraided him with a curt warning: “Nobody does any business off me.”

  Kubernik’s encyclopedic knowledge of music particularly endeared him to Spector, and made him a natural ally of the Kessels. When Spector invited him to play percussion on the Dion sessions, Kubernik was the only person in the room, including Dion, who could not only name all of the singer’s early recordings for Laurie Records, including the B-sides, but also who had published them. Spector was usually suspicious of journalists, but Kubernik was careful not to abuse the friendship, and Spector took an almost paternalistic interest in his career. When Kubernik sent Spector a birthday greeting, typed on his rickety old typewriter, Spector telephoned to say that he had a number of electric typewriters at the house and that Harvey was welcome to use one. The grateful journalist drove over to collect it.

  Kubernik used the typewriter for months, always careful to thank Spector for the gift whenever he saw him. One day, he received a call: Spector and the Kessels were having dinner at the Cock ’n Bull, a restaurant on the Sunset Strip. Would he like to join them? Kubernik offered his apologies. For weeks, he had been dating a young actress, and tonight he was on a promise. “I made the mistake of bragging ‘she’s coming over to my apartment, and she’s never really gone all the way with a guy…’ I told
him my game plan. We were going to wait till midnight, when she was turning twenty-one. Phil said, ‘What’s next, spin the bottle?’”

  That evening, at 11:45, with Kubernik and his girlfriend having worked their way through half a bottle of Southern Comfort, clothes scattered over the floor, there was a sharp rap at the door. A furious Kubernik opened it to find George Brand standing there. “You are in possession of Mr. Spector’s typewriter,” Brand announced. “He would like it back.” Gun bulging ostentatiously in its holster, Brand walked through the living room into the kitchen, picked up the typewriter, and walked out without saying a word. Kubernik’s girlfriend promptly burst into tears. “It was as if the Mob had come over. She wouldn’t even let me walk her to her car. It was the end of the relationship.”

  For days, Kubernik stewed over the incident. Did Spector really need the typewriter that badly? Couldn’t it have been collected during the day? Perhaps, Kubernik thought, he had not been profuse enough in his gratitude: He had written a thank-you note, but perhaps one note wasn’t enough—he should have written more. Perhaps it was a mistake to have told Spector that part of his seduction plan was to play the Motown Christmas album—a favorite of Kubernik’s: he should have told him he would be playing the Philles Christmas album instead. Kubernik finally concluded that Spector was “teaching me something. Phil does these Gurdjieff-type exercises on people. I think he wanted me to learn about ownership, and not being reliant or co-dependent on anything or anybody. Especially a tool that was going to be my future.”